Burials Read online

  “You sure?” Faye said, although she knew better than to doubt Joe when he was tracking somebody or something.

  “Yep. Some of these branches have been cut.”

  Seeing her nervous glance down the road, looking for someone lurking at the end of it, he said, “Don’t worry. They aren’t here today. The scars on these branches ain’t that fresh. But somebody’s been down this road, and it wasn’t very long ago.”

  “Will Roy know that somebody was here today? Are we leaving tracks?”

  Joe looked out the rear window. “Not bad. There’s a lot of leaves and pine straw on top of the gravel. He’d be able to tell somebody’d been here if he got out and looked, but why would he do that? Is he expecting anybody to be out here?”

  “Maybe, but I think he’d be surprised to find out I was the one trying to beat him to the evidence.”

  The road appeared to end abruptly at the edge of an overgrown clearing, but Faye could see that it had once turned sharply to the right, heading into the woods. She turned the wheel hard and eased the car down the completely overgrown side road.

  “In case you hadn’t figured it out,” Joe said, “nobody’s been cutting these branches. Nobody’s been down this side road in a long, long time.”

  “Even I can see that. This must be where Emily waited in her car all those years ago. If I leave our car here, I’m guessing you can’t see it from the road or from the house.”

  “You’re probably right. Good thing it’s green.”

  Faye picked her way through the row of trees separating the car from the clearing where Sophia Townsend’s cabin must be. Or maybe it wasn’t there at all now. Rot could have taken it to the ground. A lightning strike or a wildfire could have turned it to ash. Sophia had been dead so long that these woods could have burned and recovered more than once without a trace of scorched earth left behind.

  “Try not to leave a trail,” Joe said. “It’s probably better to walk in the tall grass, as long as you don’t knock too much of it down.”

  The overgrown grasses parted as Faye pushed her way through, but they hid bushes with stiff, woody branches that didn’t yield so easily. The branches poked their sharp ends into her shins. If she hadn’t been wearing long pants, they would have drawn blood as soon as she left the car.

  Now that Faye was clear of the trees, she could see the cabin, but the rampant vegetation kept her from rushing to its front steps. Then she unexpectedly stepped into a strip of land where she felt less claustrophobic. She looked at Joe to see if he noticed.

  He just pointed to hacked-off shrub branches and said, “Like I said, somebody’s been here. They cleared a path through this mess, but it wasn’t today and it wasn’t this week. It’s been weeks, maybe months.”

  “But not years?”

  “No.”

  They were within a stone’s throw of the cabin now, and Faye could see that it was largely intact. A fallen branch had caved in the roof at the back of the house, but the floor of the porch stretching across its front still looked sturdy enough.

  As she walked across the overgrown land that used to be Sophia Townsend’s front yard, she smelled mint as her feet crushed an untended herb garden. Morning glory vines crawled up the cabin’s nearest wall and onto the roof. It was still early morning, so the purple and white blooms were like colorful trumpets. If someone had told Faye that those vines were holding up the cabin’s walls, she would have believed them.

  Milk-and-wine lilies sprawled in the weeds on either side of the porch stairs, quietly saying, “A gardener once lived here.”

  The stairs took Faye and Joe to the cabin’s porch, where the front door stood open. Marks on the wood floor showed where someone had pushed hard on the damp-swollen door to get it to open. Was it the person who had cleared the road and slashed the branches that had blocked their path?

  Even though every part of Faye was telling her that she mustn’t intrude on the desolate privacy of this neglected cabin, she stepped onto the porch of Sophia Townsend’s last home and peered in.

  The cabin consisted of a large room that held a kitchen and a living area, with a partially enclosed bedroom at the back. The branch that had pierced the roof still protruded from the ceiling in the rear of the house. Today, it brought a bit of light into a space that had been unlit for a long time. Years of rainy days had turned the bed under the hole into a sagging, mildewed heap. The floor underneath would soon collapse.

  Faye felt a sudden chill. It may have been real, or it may have been the realization that this had been a place where someone had been happy. Now there was no life here at all, other than the encroaching vines.

  The front of the house, by contrast, was largely undamaged, other than the rot and mold around closed windows that had leaked steadily over the years. The furniture was still draped in mildewed sheets, just as Mickey had said. A thick layer of dust covered the kitchen counters, the desk, the floor, everything. To the right of the doorway stood Sophia’s desk and three overfull bookcases. To the left was an old upright piano. It was intact, but its keys rested at uneven heights all across the keyboard, like bad teeth.

  “It’s gonna be hard to walk across that floor and not leave tracks in the dust,” Joe said.

  “No problem.”

  Faye’s eyes were attuned to the precise shade of blue of Sophia’s field notebooks, so her attention had gone straight to the desktop. The notebook lying there was unmistakable. No dust could completely dim that color of ultramarine.

  “There it is. Right on top. It’s either the last notebook she used or an empty one that she was going to use next. What do you bet me that it’s the one we’re looking for? Fifty-fifty shot.”

  “I’m not taking that bet,” Joe said. “She used that one. Look at the dirt on the cover. You can see it even through the dust.”

  “You know what that means? It means that she made it home on that last Friday.”

  Faye didn’t need to go into the cabin and leave her tracks on the dust-covered floor. She pulled a tissue out of her purse to keep from leaving fingerprints, then she leaned hard to the right and snagged the book, carefully lifting it from the dusty desk. She was surprised that it didn’t feel dustier, damper, older. It seemed that the advertisements for weather-proof field notebooks weren’t lying.

  Gesturing for Joe to follow her, Faye backed across the porch and dropped cross-legged in the tall grass to photograph the pages. It was awkward, using a tissue in the hand holding the book. Using a pencil to turn the pages took even more concentration, but she thought she could do it. She figured that there was a better likelihood that clues to Sophia Townsend’s death would be found in the final entries, so she started with the last page with handwriting and worked forward.

  When Joe saw what she was doing, he took the phone from her hand and started snapping pictures for her as she flipped the pages. Together, they made quick progress.

  Four pages in, Joe almost dropped the phone. “Would you look at that?”

  Sophia’s drawing of the figurine was so realistic that Faye felt like the little pottery woman could step off the page. Faye had only seen parts of her right side, because the thief had taken away her chance to dig it up and study it. Sophia had seen the whole thing and she had illustrated its every detail.

  On the facing page was a drawing of thirteen spheres arranged as if they’d been scattered across a tabletop. Sophia had shaded and stippled their surface texture, but she’d been working with a charcoal pencil, so it hadn’t been possible to depict the pearls’ red tinge.

  A few more pages in, another of Sophia’s lovely illustrations jumped out at her. It depicted the Mississippian potsherd that Emily had found, after it was broken into three pieces. The drawing that Faye had already seen had shown the complete potsherd, with lines drawn at the two fractures.

  Faye stared at the picture of a plain potsherd, a heart-shaped sh
erd ornamented with incised curves, and a third sherd, also ornamented, with a point that would fit neatly into the notch of the heart.

  She didn’t want Joe to see this until she’d had time to tell him about the connection between his father and Sophia’s final days. More than a month had passed between the day Sly quit the job and the day this picture had been drawn. She wished she could explain how the sherd had come into his hands, but she couldn’t, and she was afraid that this was a bad thing for his dad.

  She quickly took the phone from Joe’s hand and snapped a picture, turning the page before he saw the drawing of the three potsherds. She feebly covered for taking over the job he’d volunteered to do for her by saying, “We’ve got to wrap this up before Roy and his people get here.”

  On cue, Joe’s phone beeped. He glanced at the text and said, “It’s Dad. Cloud just left. He said, ‘I told Roy and Bigbee every story about Sophia and her shovel bums that I knew. Was about to start making up some lies but remembered I was talking to the cops. Thought I better let them leave.’”

  “It took us a while to get here from Sylacauga,” Faye said. “We have some time before they show up.”

  The words were hardly out of her mouth when they heard gravel crunch. In a heartbeat, Faye was up and on the porch, crossing it in a single step that she hoped didn’t leave much of a footprint. She leaned in the door and replaced the notebook, leapt off the porch and ran for the woods, doing her best to keep to the strip cleared of brush by the mysterious person who had been there before them.

  Joe caught up with her quickly and he could easily have passed her. Instead, he matched her step by step in their run for cover. Faye thought he might be planning to pick her up and throw her into the shadows, so she put on another burst of speed. Together, they dropped flat on the ground and let the underbrush hide them.

  Sophia Townsend’s mountain retreat was so quiet that the grinding sound of gravel under tires seemed nearer than it was. Faye would have sworn the vehicle should have arrived already, but all she could see was a cloud of dust. This must have been how she and Joe had looked as they approached. If a car kicked up this much of a mess just by rolling slowly down the road, they couldn’t hope to leave unseen until Cloud and Bigbee had gone. She and Joe were going to be lying here in the dirt for quite some time.

  “Your dad only texted that Cloud was leaving a minute ago,” she said. “How is this happening?”

  “Maybe the cell service is bad out here and the text didn’t go right through? I’m surprised there’s service out here at all.”

  Faye didn’t like to think about what it would be like if Cloud found them. Sneaking out here and hiding in the woods made them look guilty, but of what? Neither she nor Joe were plausible suspects for the murder.

  Would he suspect them of tampering with evidence to hide Joe’s father’s guilt? They’d kept their fingerprints off the notebook and they’d left the cabin undisturbed, but they had tampered with the evidence in a small way by simply moving and handling the notebook. If Roy Cloud found out they’d done that and if he wanted to make their lives hell, he probably could.

  Faye didn’t actually care, not at the moment, though she certainly might care later. For an archaeologist, finding the original notes from the first time the figurine and pearls were uncovered was worth a certain degree of hell. No one had seen those notes in twenty-nine years. Faye couldn’t wait to read them.

  The vehicle had parked on the far side of the line of trees bordering the road. Now it wasn’t tires that were making gravel crunch. It was the work shoes of a federal agent and the chief of the Lighthorse Tribal Police.

  Faye thought that Roy must have brought a machete, because she could hear the sound of a blade hacking a path to the cabin and Bigbee didn’t seem like the machete type. Unlike Faye and Joe, they didn’t mind making noise, because they didn’t care if anybody knew they were there. And who could they reasonably expect to be here? Their work shoes trod on the patch of mint that had escaped from Sophia’s garden so long ago.

  The mint’s sharp scent reached Faye’s nose, but she paid it no attention. She was too startled by what she saw. There was no team of investigators passing in front of her and there were no work shoes. There was just a single set of boots, and there was just one machete hacking through the overgrown weeds. Neither the boots nor the machete belonged to Roy Cloud or to Agent Bigbee or to anyone from the Lighthorse Tribal Police.

  They belonged to Carson Callahan.

  ***

  Carson had just slashed his way across Sophia Townsend’s front yard and walked into the cabin. Faye didn’t dare speak to Joe, but she turned her head enough to meet his eyes. He looked stunned to see his old friend.

  Within seconds, Carson came out of the cabin, retracing his steps down the newly cleared path. She and Joe were well-hidden, but Carson was in such a hurry that he might not have noticed them if they’d been right out in the open. Faye’s heart sank as he passed near where she hid. He had an ultramarine blue field notebook under his arm.

  It was as if Carson, too, was trying to get in and out before Roy and Bigbee arrived. The only difference was that they hadn’t come there to keep evidence out of the hands of the law, and Carson had apparently come for that express purpose.

  They heard gravel under his feet again as he stepped onto the road. The sound of his truck door slamming echoed in the stillness. Then the truck roared to life and made its way back down the mountain, kicking up a pall of dust as it went.

  “It would serve him right to run into Cloud on the way down,” Joe said.

  “Yeah, but it’s not going to happen. Your dad said that Roy just left Sylacauga. Carson will be long gone by the time he gets here.”

  “Guess we should get going, too.”

  Faye shook her head. “We can’t go.”

  “Are we going to lay here until Cloud and Bigbee come, watch what they do, then wait till they’re gone before go home?”

  “I have to talk to him. He’ll be angry, but there’s no help for it.”

  Joe’s face had about a dozen questions on it. “What do we owe Roy Cloud? Let’s get out of here.”

  She held out her phone, with the last picture they’d taken of the notebook on its screen. “If we leave, he won’t know the notebook was here. He won’t even know for sure that it exists. He won’t know what was in it. And he won’t know that Carson took it. We know all those things. I might be willing to push the law a little bit by reading the notebook and putting it back. I’m not willing to withhold evidence that could get justice for Sophia Townsend.”

  “Then can we get up off the ground and go sit in the car while we look at those pictures? We might as well find out what’s in the notebook so we can tell Cloud as soon as he shows up. While we’re telling him that we tried to do an end run around him by sneaking out here, I mean.”

  “Yeah. He won’t be happy to hear that.”

  They got up, pulled twigs out of their hair, and walked back to the car. There was no more reason to hide, so they drove it out of its leafy hiding place and waited in the open spot at the end of the road where Carson had parked.

  Faye held the phone in her hands, delaying the moment when they looked at the pages together. “Why do you think Carson came out here to get the notebook?” she asked. “And how do you think he knew it was here?”

  “We know somebody drove out here lately. I saw where they’d cut those limbs. It could’ve been Carson. But how did he find it in the first place? To do that, he had to know the notebook existed, he had to know that it was here, and he had to know how to find this cabin.”

  “I’ve been thinking that through,” Faye said. “Once Cloud knew the cabin was in Arkansas, he had the location in minutes. If Carson knew that much, then he could check property records and find this place just as easily. And I’m pretty sure he did know that much.”

  “Why?”r />
  “Carson described the cabin to me, and he got it absolutely right, so he must have been here. Carson told me that Sophia had a garden and a piano and a lot of books, and all those things are true. When he told me about her cabin, I didn’t realize that its location was such a state secret. I didn’t realize what it really meant when he described its every detail.”

  Faye wondered how the land around her would look now if Sophia had lived to tend it. There would be no mildew in the cabin, no roadside underbrush obscuring her view of it, no weeds in the herb garden, no dust on the well-swept front porch. Sophia’s absence was palpable here.

  “Can you imagine getting that piano up here?” she asked. “You’d have to tie it down in the back of a pickup and hope for the best.”

  Faye looked down the road, waiting for the dust that would herald Roy Cloud’s arrival.

  “Why do you think Carson would have been out here when he was eleven years old?” Joe asked.

  “Carson said that he remembered her, but he never really talked to her. We have no reason to think that Sophia liked children, so I don’t think she was the one who brought him out here. We do know, however, that his father was having an affair with Sophia. It would be horrifyingly inappropriate to bring your child with you when you visited your lover, but people do inappropriate things when they’re in love.”

  “Well, yeah. Or in lust.”

  “You’re a dad, and you were a kid once. Think about it. An eleven-year-old would absolutely notice the sign that marked the state border. Kids are fascinated by that kind of thing. They keep a count of how many states they’ve visited. Carson would remember, and he’d have known to look for the cabin in Arkansas, even though Roy Cloud didn’t. But I have no idea why Carson has come back here as an adult, probably twice, and I don’t know why he took the field notebook, since he didn’t take it the last time he was here. I’m guessing he got wind about the law coming out here, maybe because his dad told him Roy was interested in Sophia’s cabin. There must be some reason he hightailed it to Arkansas almost as fast as we did. I just don’t know why he wanted to keep that field notebook out of Roy Cloud’s hands.”